Deadly Deceits (6 page)

While we toured the house, Hanayo prepared a combination Japanese-American dinner, and we all sat down for our first meal together in more than three months. I was positive then that I'd made the right move in joining the Agency. We were two Depression-era kids from the South Side of Chicago. We had struggled and now we were in Japan in a gorgeous house overlooking a spectacular bay. We could put our worries about separations behind us, and thanks to the Agency, we were in clover.

While in Japan I worked for the China operations group, whose responsibilities included overseeing or supporting the following CIA units: a large unit in Seoul established in response to the Korean War; a huge station on Taiwan that conducted a variety of agent, guerrilla, propaganda, and over-flight operations against mainland China; a refugee interrogation unit in Hong Kong operated jointly with the British; and a major base on Okinawa that provided logistical support for the Agency's far-flung units.

At first I worked at an isolated training area located at the base of a mountain not too far from Tokyo. Armed sentries denied entry to all but official personnel. Our job was to train foreign nationals in the mechanics of intelligence gathering, but after we trained one small group, the compound was closed in favor of more accessible training sites. As a relatively new and junior employee, I, unfortunately, was assigned to the records office as a file checker, which had all the appeal of a Montgomery Ward section head.

Even though I felt that what I was doing was not of itself of any great import, I believed it contributed to the more important efforts of others. I was but one tiny cog in the immense and noble effort to save the world from the International Communist Conspiracy and to help roll back the Iron Curtain. I did not plan to work in the records office forever and continued to be on the lookout for an opportunity to get directly involved. I wanted the greater prestige and challenge given to the case officer out on the front lines, but for the time being I was content to do the less glamorous, but necessary, file tracing to support the Agency's important global work.

Yet the truth is that I was only generally aware of the nature of CIA operations at the time. The strictures of the “need-to-know” policy—in which each employee was allowed to know only that information necessary to perform his job—made it difficult to ascertain just what the Agency was doing. It was only many years later that I learned that the Agency in the decade of the 1950s, reacting to a perceived threat from monolithic international communism, had conducted hundreds of covert operations around the world. That period saw a concentration both on operations and development of the infrastructure necessary to implement those activities, including funding mechanisms, proprietary companies, airlines, and media organizations. Within the Agency the international organizations division was coordinating an extensive propaganda effort aimed at developing an international anti-communist ideology. According to the U.S. Senate's Church Committee report of 1976, “The Division's activities included operations to assist or to create international organizations for youth, students, teachers, workers, veterans, journalists, and jurists. This kind of activity was an attempt to lay an intellectual
foundation for anti-communism around the world. Ultimately, the organizational underpinnings could serve as a political force in assuring the establishment or maintenance of democratic governments.”
¹

The influence and power of the Agency increased greatly after the election of President Eisenhower, who had come to power based in part on his pledge to lift the Iron Curtain. Eisenhower appointed Allen Dulles as director of the CIA and John Foster Dulles, his brother, as Secretary of State. The triumvirate of Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers gave the Agency immense power not only to conduct operations but also to formulate foreign policy. Allen Dulles was an activist, totally absorbed in covert operations, who ignored the Agency's intelligence-gathering and coordination functions. “With the Soviet Union and communist parties as the targets the Agency concentrated on developing anti-Communist political strength,” wrote the Church Committee. “Financial support to individual candidates, subsidies to publications including newspapers and magazines, involvement in local and national labor unions—all of these interlocking elements constituted the fundamentals of a typical political action program. Elections, of course, were key operations, and the Agency involved itself in electoral politics on a continuing basis.”
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“Geographically the order of priorities,” the report noted, “was Western Europe, the Far East, and Latin America. With the Soviets in Eastern Europe and Communist parties still active in France and Italy, Europe appeared to be the area most vulnerable to Communist encroachments. The CIA Station in West Berlin was the center of CIA operations against Eastern Europe and the German Branch of the European Division was the Agency's largest single country component.”
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Here, by region, is a brief summary of some of the Agency's operations in the 1950s, most of which I knew nothing about at the time.

* Eastern Europe. The Agency was sponsoring various intelligence-collection missions and resistance movements aimed at the countries of Eastern Europe. It established Radio Free Europe to broadcast to Eastern European countries and Radio Liberty aimed at the Soviet Union. The combined budgets of the two stations amounted to between $30 million and $35 million annually.
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Beginning in 1950 the Agency funded
the Congress of Cultural Freedom, a private cultural organization which ultimately received more than $1 million.
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The Agency also was in contact with a resistance movement in the Soviet Ukraine.
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In the early 1950s it was providing men, gold, and military and communications equipment to the Polish Freedom Movement.
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This support only ceased when Polish security announced that it controlled the movement. Beginning in 1950, the CIA in a joint operation with the British also organized efforts to overthrow the Enver Hoxha government of Albania.
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All of these attempts achieved little and the CIA for a period seemed to slow its efforts to lift the Iron Curtain. In late 1956, however, it reinitiated those operations and laid plans for uprisings in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Rumania. Radio Free Europe assured Eastern European audiences of United States backing for their liberation aspirations at the same time that CIA groups, called Red Sox/Red Cap, were being infiltrated into those nations' capitals to make plans with the “freedom fighters” to throw off the “yoke of communism.” In fact, neither the external nor the internal support was as promised, and the Hungarian freedom fighters' call to fight communism was answered by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who ordered Soviet forces into Budapest on November 4, 1956. Up to 32,000 people were killed, more than 170,000 fled the country, and Janos Kadar, sponsored by the U.S.S.R., became the first secretary of the ruling Hungarian Workers Party.
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General Lucian Truscott, the CIA's deputy director for “community affairs,” evaluated the failure and ongoing plans to try again in Czechoslovakia. He concluded that if allowed to proceed, the Agency's plans would raise “the prospect of a general war in Europe to an intolerable level.”
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* Western Europe. In this area in the 1950s the “CIA subsidized political parties, individual leaders, labor unions, and other groups.… Millions of secret dollars were being poured into both Socialist and anti-communist parties in Portugal, France, West Germany, among others.”
¹¹
In Italy, especially, the CIA was beginning covert financing of the Christian Democratic Party “with payments averaging as high as three million dollars a year.…”
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* Far East. Here the Agency was conducting the gamut of
operations. According to the Church Committee, “The outbreak of the Korean War [in 1950] significantly altered the nature of OPC's [the Office of Policy Coordination, the predecessor of the Directorate for Plans] paramilitary activities as well as the organization's overall size and capability. Between fiscal year 1950 and fiscal year 1951, OPC's personnel strength jumped from 584 to 1531. Most of that growth took place in paramilitary activities in the Far East.… The Korean War established OPC's and CIA's jurisdiction in the Far East and created the basic paramilitary capability that the Agency employed for twenty years. By 1953, the elements of that capability were ‘in place'—aircraft, amphibious craft, and an experienced group of personnel. For the next quarter century paramilitary activities remained the major CIA covert activity in the Far East.”
¹³

In Korea itself, of course, the Agency was training and infiltrating hundreds of South Korean paramilitary troops behind enemy lines. But its activities extended far beyond that country. In 1950, the Agency established a large cover structure on Taiwan known as Western Enterprises.
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It and one of the Agency's airlines, Civil Air Transport, were CIA vehicles for preparing and dropping teams of Chinese Nationalists on mainland China. The Agency sent two different types of teams—commando and resistance. Resistance teams were to parachute into China, contact dissident people there, and gradually build a viable resistance to Mao Tse-tung's government. Commandos usually were sent in via small boats from the offshore island of Quemoy, later famous as a subject of the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960. Their mission was to attack and destroy key installations on the mainland. Word of these operations began to leak out after two Americans, Thomas Downey and Richard Fecteau, were shot down in 1952 on a mission over the mainland.

Though I was not aware of it, the Agency was at this time also supporting an attempt to invade Communist China. In 1949, when the Chinese Communists drove the Nationalists from the mainland, a force of Chinese Nationalists under General Li Mi had fled across the Yunnan border into Burma. They established themselves in Burma at sites near the Thai border. With the cooperation of the Thai government the Agency's airline, Civil Air Transport, began massive supply operations to those troops. The 200-man CIA structure in
Thailand known as Sea Supply Company,
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with its brother, Western Enterprises Company, undertook the logistical effort to build and outfit Li Mi's army.

In 1951, several thousand of General Li Mi's troops invaded Yunnan Province and were quickly defeated and driven out. The Agency, predicting that the peasants in Yunnan would rise up in opposition to Mao's government, readied another large invasion. Li Mi's troops augmented their own strength by recruiting 8,000 men from the indigenous hill tribes in Burma. The CIA shipped in another increment of about 1,000 crack Chinese Nationalist troops from Taiwan, and its airline began regular shuttle flights to bases and camps in Burma, using Thai airstrips for refueling and resupply.
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In August 1952 this army invaded Yunnan, reaching into the province up to 60 miles. Once again the peasants did not rise up as predicted, and the army was driven out.
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General Li Mi gave up attempts to defeat China, established a quasi-independent state in Burma, and became involved in running the lucrative opium trade. In this endeavor he had the help of General Phao Siyanon of Thailand.

In Thailand, the Agency, via Sea Supply Company, threw its full support behind the political ambitions of General Phao, making him the strongest man in the country. In exchange he allowed the Agency to develop two Thai paramilitary organizations—the Police Aerial Reconnaissance Unit and the Border Patrol Police.
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In the Philippines from 1950 through 1953, U.S. Air Force Colonel Edward Lansdale conducted a series of Agency operations to destroy the communist Huk insurgency. With a strong effort from the Agency, Philippine General Ramon Magsaysay not only successfully destroyed the Huks but also was elected President of the Philippines.
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Following Colonel Lansdale's successes in the Philippines, the Agency in 1954 sent him to South Vietnam to help create the Diem regime. The burgeoning effort first to install the Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem in power and then to legitimize and extend his control over the rural Buddhist South Vietnamese was one of the Agency's most successful operations. It was not until years later, through the publication of the
Pentagon Papers
, that details of this operation became known. At about the same time it was installing Diem in the South, the CIA
launched sabotage and guerrilla operations against North Vietnam.
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(For more detail on the CIA's involvement in Vietnam, see Chapter 10.)

In Indonesia in 1958, Agency B-26 bombers supported rebel units in the Celebes fighting to overthrow the government of President Achmed Sukarno,
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something that was not accomplished on this attempt but was achieved in 1965 by another Agency operation.

In 1959, the Agency began instigating the Tibetans to fight the Chinese. The Agency established a secret base at Camp Dale in Colorado and trained Tibetan guerrillas who were then infiltrated back into Tibet to fight. The Agency-trained guerrillas helped the Dalai Lama to flee.
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The Agency's airline, Civil Air Transport, provided air support for many of these operations. Civil Air Transport, which flew mainly in the Far East, was one of the earliest of the various airlines the Agency developed over the years. The CIA at one point attempted to audit its widespread airline holdings. After a three-month investigation it could not say exactly how many planes it owned, but two of its airlines, Air America and Air Asia, along with the Agency's holding company, the Pacific Corporation, employed more than 10,000 people.
²³

* Latin America. The United States has always considered Latin America to be within its particular sphere of influence and has dominated the political life of that area. In the 1950s the Agency was given the primary role of imposing U.S. will over Latin America. Its most famous operation there was in Guatemala, where on June 18, 1954, it led the coup that overthrew the government of Jacobo Arbenz. CIA agents trained and supported the forces of Colonel Carlos Castillo-Armas, who assumed power after the defeat of Arbenz. Agency support included the provision of CIA-piloted World War II fighter-bombers, as well as guns and ammunition.
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